Best Visual Effects Nominees
Dune
Free Guy
No Time to Die
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Spider-Man: No Way Home
o Notable snubs: The Green Knight & Titane. Both belong on this list more than Free Guy or either Marvel feature.
o Prediction: Dune seems to have a lot of support behind it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Marvel mob pressured the Academy to give No Way Home or Shang-Chi the nod.
- No Time to Die. If I had to choose based off this list of nominees, No Time to Die would get my vote. I could go on a longer rant about this, but suffice it to say: huge respect for most (all?) of these stunts and effects being practical, not digital. CGI can be useful (e.g.: Parasite), but a lot of these movies abuse it in a way that affects the quality of the shot and our experience as viewers. It’s awesome to see a film crew still going out of its way to make these scenes as real as they possibly can. Give them their flowers!
- Spider-Man: No Way Home. Because they’re so often used as military propaganda, I tend to avoid Marvel movies as a rule. That being said, this movie literally topped the world charts at one point & is now Oscar-nominated, so it would’ve been irresponsible on my end to not watch it. It's important to think about popular culture and not confine ourselves to niche arthouse movies. Visually, there were definitely some scenes where the CGI got rough, but overall Marvel managed to avoid the dark-grey mess we got with films like End Game; but this is a small upside. I wouldn’t watch it again, and I can’t recommend it.
- Dune. I think this is probably the front-runner given the choices. While I did love this movie, it making this list just doesn’t feel right. If we’re nominating fantasy/sci-fi, I really think The Green Knight honestly deserved to at least be nominated, if not win, a bit of a shame. Regardless, this movie was a ton of fun. Giant sandworms, tragic space battles, there’s definitely enough material here for it to have earned its spot on this list. I still think Villenueve’s the best sci-fi epic director out there right now, I just think visual effects were used more effectively in other films last year.